Jackie BrooknerLlengües natives

Jackie Brookner is the artist selected to close
the "Anatomies of the soul" cycle in the Espai 13 at the Joan
Miro Foundation. During the 1996-97 season, 8 exhibitors have analysed,
from different disciplines and different points of view, one of the foremost
themes of today's art: identity, the knowledge of oneself and, in more general
terms, the human body.

Jackie Brookner has always been interested in the various parts of the
human anatomy. For her, each organ, each extremity, has its own meaning
and its own interpretation. In this installation that closes the current
cycle in the Espai 13, she deals with the tongue both as bodily organ and
as language.

Over 50 sculptures made from different coloured earth from different
parts of Spain show the tongue in different positions. Jackie Brookner listened
to the sounds of catalan and castillian and imagined the shapes of the tongues
that speak these languages, not as specific phonetic sounds, but more as
metaphore for the different characters or personalities of the language.
She then made the catalan tongues from soils from Catalonia and the castillian
tongues of soils from central Spain. The colors and textures of the soil
have rich variation from reds to grays to purples and yellows. The exhibition
also contains a voice installation with people talking in different dialects
and loudspeakers repeating a series of everyday words in Catalan and Spanish.
The sculptures here are a metaphor for the different position of languages
in each country, and the artist is particularly interested in those countries
in which there is a conflictive linguistic situation. For Jackie Brookner,
the tongue is both a faculty and an extremely subtle organ that we use not
only to speak but also to taste, to feel and to express our feelings.

This exhibition, which will remain open until 27th
July, marks the end of a cycle in which different proposals have analysed
the human body from varying points of view albeit with considerable consistency.
From Jesus Galdon's intimate geography, to the transgression of the rules
of the social game in the performance by the group; from Locurto/Outcault's
effective, direct challenge, to the vulnerability of the artist and, in
the final instance of the artist's body, denounced by Paco Cao; the entire
cycle, including Stephen Taylor Woodrow's arresting performance depicting
the decline and death of art through a hospital ward, has aimed to show
the artists' concern for the physical and spiritual geography of the human
body. As part of the Foundation's aim to open the Espai 13 to more artists,
the cycle has also included "Open Space", a new venture this season
that has allowed almost 40 artists to show work relating to the theme of
"Anatomies of the soul".